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1 The City During the winter of 1869, an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune found that “in our principal thoroughfares the richly-dressed lady of the avenue magnificently sweeps by her thinly-clad sister of the alley who, with scanty clothing, hurries from her fireless garret to perform her daily fourteen hours labor for a pittance too small to pay rent and purchase sufficient food, much less comfortable raiment, for this inclement season. Worse than this, there are houseless wanderers in our streets who in vain seek for employment , and whose mode of existence is a mystery. Worst of all, there are many among us to whose dire poverty is added sickness, or, may be, they are crippled from accident, and who are entirely dependent on the charity of the public.” The writer was experiencing the shock of a new social order that had emerged with amazing rapidity during the 1860s, while the country was fighting the Civil War and trying to reconstruct the South. The new social world was rooted in the transformation of the city from a commercial center into a dynamo of industrial capitalism. Ironically, it was this new Chicago that burned down two years later in October 1871, only to be rebuilt with the same amazing rapidity with which it had emerged. Despite all this change, the sense of social distance and cultural crisis communicated by this author remained.1 The social order being replaced in the 1860s was that of a preindustrial commercial city. Up through the 1850s, Chicago was a gateway for the exchange of eastern manufactured goods and western primary products. Its elite were composed of merchants who were boosters, promoters, and real estate speculators ; they reinvested relatively little of their profits in manufacturing or the employment of labor. Instead they invested in land and then lobbied all levels of government to build the infrastructure that would turn it into profitable real estate. In the manufacturing sector, traditional craft labor practices remained, even as more advanced production techniques, such as stationary steam engines , made inroads. The shops in which the railroads repaired their cars were the city’s most advanced manufacturing establishments, and they were funded Jentz_Schneirov_Chicago.indd 13 2/16/12 10:51 AM by capital from outside the city, not by local entrepreneurs. Rather than invest inindustrialpursuits,Chicago’smerchanttradinghousesfocusedtheirenergies on inventing and institutionalizing the modern commercial practices, such as grain futures and standard measures of quality, which permitted them to participate in an impersonal national, and even international, market. The preindustrial outlook of the boosters had its counterpart in the way political leaders minimized the significance of wage labor. Abraham Lincoln famously described the antebellum North as a free labor society in which no man needed to be a wage earner for his whole life: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This . . . is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Lincoln exaggerated the extent of social mobility, while underestimating the permanence of wage labor within the larger free labor North.2 Lincoln and his fellow Republican leaders knew that wage labor posed problems for their vision of the good and prosperous society, and they sought to reconcile the two. There were two major Republican factions. In the view of those like Lincoln, who believed that ownership of productive property was vital for an independent citizenry, wage labor became a phase in an individual ’s life dedicated to social mobility. The other large element of opinion among Republicans stressed wage labor’s dignity and freedom, even if it was a permanent condition. Countering taunts from slaveholders that northern workers were “wage slaves,” they stressed the choices workers had in selecting their employers, the products they bought, and their political leaders. They also stressed the dignified family life they led.3 The fast-disappearing society that Lincoln mythologized was rooted in a mode of production in which households were the prevalent economic unit, and these households were led by men who owned productive property , most commonly land but also a shop or tools. To Lincoln such men, who were neither capitalists nor laborers, constituted the “large majority” of the population in the North: “Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in...

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